A new (upstream) simdjson release was announced by Daniel Lemire earlier this week, and my Twitter mentions have been running red-hot ever since as he was kind enough to tag me. Do look at that blog post, there is some impressive work in there. We wrapped up the (still very simple) rcppsimdjson around it last night and shipped it this morning.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire. Via some very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. For illustration, I highly recommend the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2020-04-03)

Upgraded to new upstream releases 0.3 and 0.3.1 (Dirk in #9 closing #8)

Updated example validateJSON to API changes.

But because Daniel is such a fantastic upstream developer to collaborate with, he even filed a full feature-request ‘maybe you can consider upgrading’ as issue #8 at our repo containing the fully detailed list of changes. As it is so impressive I will simple quote the upper half of just the major changes:

Highlights

Simplified API: The API has been completely revamped for ease of use, including a new JSON navigation API and fluent support for error code and exception styles of error handling with a single API. Docs